The Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) has defined a standard known as SCTE 130-3 which defines an interface that can be used for Digital Program Insertion. According to this standard, content (such as a television program) to be delivered to users is stored digitally, and instead of including advertisements inline in the stored content, the stored content includes markers indicating the relevant location for advertisements. When the program is being transmitted advertisements can be selected on the fly for insertion at the relevant locations. The use of an extensible markup language (XML) schema allows for identification not only of placement opportunities but also information such as placement decision data and placement related event data that is exchanged between two network elements, the Advertisement Management Service (ADM) and the Advertisement Decision Service (ADS). The role of these nodes, and the manner in which they function is described in detail in the SCTE 130 family of specifications (available at http://www.scte.org/)
As defined in the SCTE 130 standards, these nodes are considered to be part of the network infrastructure, and are implemented as network based servers. As such, configuration of the servers is performed by system administrators. The ADM and ADS are statically configured, have fixed IP addresses and are expected to have high levels of availability.
One drawback to this conventional setup is that the ADM and ADS become network elements that do not provide flexibility in their use given that their addresses have to be known in advance and static. This presents limitations to the deployment of SCTE-130 in architectures where any of the 2 addresses is dynamic in nature.
In Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) defined standards, the Open IPTV Function node (OITF) serves as the user's interface to the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) network. The connectivity of the node is not considered to be reliable, as the user can cycle power to the device, and the OITF can also be implemented in a terminal such as a computer (including mobile devices) that does not have continuous network functionality. The OITF is a logical location for an ADM as it would allow SCTE 130-3 standard compliant nodes to be used to insert advertisements into content-on-demand (COD) stream, and it allows for more refined and a granular information to be provided to the ADS so that advertisements relevant to a particular user can be selected. However because the IP address of the OITF is not fixed and because the OITF can be moved from location to location the OITF does not conform to the requirements of a standards compliant ADM. An ADM that would be tolerant of an unreliable connection and could be implemented at the user premises and possibly integrated with end equipment such as an OITF would provide numerous advantages and allow it to be used in COD sessions, and in all IPTV, and non-IPTV applications requiring support for target advertisements. Presently this is prevented by difficulties in implementation, as the ADS would need to be able to find the ADM when required, and would also be required to recognize the ADM when initialized at a different address (in case of mobility). The ADM cannot be provided with a static address for an ADS, as the ADS that it connects to can be changed based on geography or selection of networks.
It is, therefore, desirable to provide a mechanism for automated configuration of both ADS and ADM nodes in a network which would allow for a mobile or end-user-equipment version of an ADM.